Married couple Cathy Richardson and Rachel Regan pictured during a rally against Proposition 8 in San Francisco (Photo: REUTERS)

Last year, I found myself addressing the Republican committee of a rural county in America's Deep South. Its members looked much as I had expected members of a Republican committee in the Deep South to look: rugged and sunburned. During the question and answer session, I was asked why the GOP, having dominated late twentieth century politics, was faring so badly.

I replied that the party’s most serious mistake had been its retreat from localism. The Republicans started winning in the 1960s when they embraced states’ rights and the devolution of power. They started losing forty years later when they abandoned these principles. The audience growled its approval and so, perhaps incautiously, I began to list the areas where Bush administration had foolishly extended central power, ranging from the rise in federal spending to the attempt to strike down state laws legalising same-sex unions. When I mentioned same-sex unions, a growl passed through the room, and I winced inwardly: this, I thought, was perhaps not the wisest example to have offered a Republican committee in the Deep South.

Sure enough, after I had finished, a man with a beard and a red baseball cap sauntered up to me.

“Son,” he said, “Ah ’preciate you comin’, an’ Ah ’greed with most of wut you said. But Ah must disagree with your position on so-called homosexual marriage.”

He paused to hitch his jeans up his great belly, looking into the middle distance.

“Far as Ah kin see, not bein’ under any pressure to git married is one of the main advantages Ah enjoy as a gay man.”

Truly, I thought, America is an extraordinary country. Every time you think you’ve got it sussed, it surprises you. It is the sheer diversity of the US that makes anti-Americanism so perverse.

Yesterday, a judge ruled that California's Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage, was unconstitutional. Here, I'd have thought, is an issue on which people of goodwill can disagree. I've never understood why conservatives oppose same-sex civil unions: surely we should be all for commitment and stability, as well as equality before the law. But I'm not sure whether the same arguments apply to marriage, which is at root a religious rather than a civil concept.

Then there is the whole question of decentralisation: surely moral questions of this kind should be determined by individual states, not federal institutions. Above all, there is the issue of judicial activism. On what basis does a federal judge presume to overturn a decision arrived at through a democratic referendum?

Whatever your view, it must be satisfying be to live in a place where referendums happen, where states' rights exist, and where lawmakers expect to take their orders from the electorate. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Britain should repatriate its revolution.